China’s Fund Management Firms Seek to Emulate Alibaba’s Yu E Bao’s Success

July 14, 2013 Leave a comment

07.12.2013 14:48

Fund Management Firms Seek to Emulate Yu E Bao’s Success

Manulife Teda starts recruiting service personnel as other firms mull an e-investment presence on Taobao

By staff reporter Cao Wenjiao

(Beijing) – Fund management companies are hurrying to establish their presence on Alibaba’s Internet platforms, after online shoppers showed great interest in Yu E Bao, a money market fund the e-commerce giant recently launched.

Beijing-based Manulife Teda Fund Management Co. has started recruiting client service personnel for its planned virtual store on Taobao, Alibaba’s e-commerce website.Its job ad says the positions will be responsible for introducing investment funds, answering customer questions and helping them navigate websites.

The company did not say when it will start its online business. The first fund it will offer is a bond-investment type of product, which the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) approved late in June.

Manulife Teda is among a number of fund management companies mulling a marketing presence on Taobao to take advantage of Alibaba’s huge customer base.

This year, Tianhong Asset Management, Bosera Funds, GF Fund Management and Harvest Fund have all been reportedly preparing a Taobao store.

The details of how an investment fund can be bought and sold online remain unclear. But analysts say the service will be like shopping for other e-products.

Many fund companies have been planning to open a Taobao store for a long time, said Zhou Xiaoming, vice president of Tian Hong Asset Management Co., the firm that jointly developed Yu E Bao with Alibaba.

Zhou has witnessed the great investment potential unleashed by Alibaba shoppers. Yu E Bao was launched on June 13 on Alibaba’s online payment site Alipay. By the end of June, more than 2.5 million users invested about 5.7 billion yuan into the service, making Tian Hong, previously a little-known fund company, the biggest money market fund manager in the country when measured by user numbers.

“Now the entire fund industry is filled with passion for opening Taobao stores,” he said. This must be approved by the CSRC first, and many companies need to upgrade their technology systems. Nevertheless, “many are almost there,” he said.

Filed under Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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